The world’s longest bug discovered in Guangxi
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A long silhouette found wriggling on a mountain road in south China has proved to be the world’s longest insect, officials said yesterday.
Zhao Li, with the Insect Museum of West China in Chengdu, found the 62.4-centimeter-long stick insect during a field inspection in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2014. It breaks the record for length for all 807,625 insects discovered so far, the IMWC said.
The previous record holder was a stick insect found in Malaysia in 2008. It measured 56.7cm and is currently at the Natural History Museum in London.
Zhao Li said he had expected to find the insect since a field inspection in Guangxi in 1998, when locals told him about seeing a half-meter-long “huge insect” as thick as a man’s index finger.
Zhao assumed a giant stick insect might exist, but never managed to see one until two years ago.
“I was collecting insects on a 1,200-meter-tall mountain in Guangxi’s Liuzhou City on the night of August 16, 2014, when a dark shadow appeared in the distance, which looked like a tree twig,” Zhao recalled. “I was shocked to find the huge insect’s legs were as long as its body.”
The insect has been named Phryganistria chinensis Zhao, and a thesis about it will be out soon.
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